When a French inventor (he had invented, among other things, a retractable spiral staircase for small two-floor apartments) explained on TV how some of his earlier inventions had been pilfered in America, the program's host asked rhetorically, "les Américains l'ont volé?!"
"The Americans stole it?!" Thus I opened an article meant to illustrate Old Europe's penchant for creating (and entertaining) collective guilt (or, when it concerns their own selves, collective wisdom, collective tolerance, collective heroics, etc, etc, etc). Think only of "They deserved 9-11!"A Clarisse Fabre article about a manuscript stolen from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France abounds with twists and turns, but if the headline isn't an indictment (The BNF requests that the United States return its stolen manuscript), it comes pretty close to one.
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